Taking education on Board

Activities that fall under the broad banner of ‘education’ enhance the reach, reputation and performance of arts organisations. Those which reach out into the community – however that is defined – broaden their appeal, draw new audiences into their work, and encourage people to engage in artistic activities. The art, or the place where the art happens, may no longer seem remote or inaccessible or elitist. Performers, artists and technicians who engage in educational activities learn about their art and about themselves by exposing themselves to the fresh eyes of non-professionals and young people – and, sometimes, by encountering lives very different from their own, learn to challenge misperceptions and stereotypes. Thus the health of the organisation is strengthened. In more instrumental terms, educational activities attract funding, both public and private, as well as political support.

Raising the debate

However, despite such persuasive reasons for giving education work a high priority in organisations’ strategic thinking, there appears to be minimal pressure on board members to deliver such work to a certain standard or set of expectations. Furthermore, board members have access to very little by way of comparative or benchmarking information against which to evaluate their organisations’ performance in this area. And although Arts Council England, other funders and sponsors declare themselves pro-education, they, too, show relatively little interest in checking what happened, and whether or not it was any good.

Against this backdrop, last year the PAEback group – a small, informal, group of people who serve on the boards of performing arts organisations, and who have a remit for, or interest in, education – spent several months clarifying our own thoughts on this. The purpose of this was to stimulate debate and share experiences about what the proper role of a board in this area might be.

We then invited key individuals from the performing arts sector to meet us, so that we could sound them out on our developing ideas. Their responses were encouraging, and, thanks to funding from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, we were able to convene a series of discussions for chairs and board members from a wide range of organisations across all performing artforms – from the largest national institutions to the smallest regional venues and touring companies. We also involved chief executives and directors of education, and a small group of funders, both commercial organisations and charitable foundations.

From the sublime to…

From these discussions, we identified a very broad spectrum of board engagement with education activities. At one end of the scale were organisations where boards were not engaged in any real sense with determining the place, nature or role of education within their organisations. Many of these organisations were large and long established, including some of our major national companies.

In many cases it was apparent that boards rarely ask why they should be involved with education activities, and, if so, how best to go about it. Education was frequently regarded as simply a ‘bolt-on’ with no impact on the core artistic activities, driven by external agendas, and seen as such something that ‘should’ be done, rather than something the company wants or believes it must do.

In addition, many board members saw education as peopled by charismatic enthusiasts with a language, agenda and type of professionalism impenetrable to them, operating in a culture of which performers and directors have no knowledge and/or regard as second rate. We also found that, in many organisations, education work is predominantly project-based, often driven by the search for funding and shifts in government policy. Some chairs and board members feel deterred from delving into this area because of a concern that they lack expertise.

At the other end of the spectrum there was a quite different picture. There are many organisations where the board regard education as integral to their overall mission and feel fully equipped to discuss education strategy and practice in an informed way – where education, in the words of one participant, runs through the organisation ‘like the letters in a stick of rock’. In these organizations, discussion about education work at board meetings was frequent and effective, involving the whole board, not just a few individuals or a sub-committee, and resulting in a group of people who were well informed about context as well as the work, and who regularly evaluated and reviewed key strategic choices. Education was seen as a two-way process.

These organisations were generally, though not exclusively, newer (often set up with Lottery money and attendant expectations of social inclusion) and/or smaller, and, in the case of regional organisations, reliant on local authority funding (which also carries explicit expectations of community involvement). Outside London and the big companies, many boards have local authority representation, and some who came to our meetings were local councillors. Their involvement on a board created a high level of expectation that organisations would actively engage with their local communities, and particularly with their local schools.

How to evaluate

Whether boards were highly engaged with education work or not, the evaluation of it was an almost universal concern. There was general agreement that, while much education work was well planned and executed, and enhanced the reputation of performing arts organisations, some of it was neither relevant, nor good. Finding ways to remedy that, in part by being able to judge and encourage high quality work, was thought to be both important and pressing.

Whilst for the professional work of the organisation there are a range of ‘performance indicators’ that together serve either directly or as proxies for measuring success – box office figures, critical acclaim, audience response, etc. – education programmes and activity are not so easily measured, and there are no generally accepted indicators. Crude numbers are insufficient and frequently unhelpful. ‘Value for money’ calculations may mislead. The difficulties of measurement include giving due weight to qualitative as well as quantitative analyses, avoiding ‘box-ticking’, and being able to gauge the relative merits of small-scale/intensive and large-scale/more wide-ranging education programmes.

We found that, where evaluation does take place, the model differs from project to project. There is a paucity of longer term evaluation in terms of continuing to monitor the effect on participants after the end of a project. Funders generally operate light-touch evaluation, and appreciate the difficulty of measuring this work: ‘If we were stricter with our evaluation we’d stop funding the arts!’ They often have to make big leaps of faith and don’t want to be or appear risk averse. Nevertheless, poor work can affect the company as a whole. One contributor to our discussions expressed concern that there is a lot of ‘tawdry’ practice and evaluation, and that many young people could be put off the arts as a result.

A holistic view

The PAEback group recognises that education is but one aspect of the role of a board. However we believe board involvement with education work is vital, because boards, by focusing on intent, outcomes, value and sustainability, carry the overarching responsibility for agreeing their organisations’ strategic direction. The serious attention of the board not only acts as a safeguard over particular activities, but also encourages that all-important holistic view of all that the organisation does.